This section provides background information related to the present disclosure which is not necessarily prior art.
Uniform resource locator (URL) shortening is a technology that consists of mapping a very long link of a website to a very short link to reduce the number of words of a microblog message. This short link is a short URL. The format of the short URL is http://shortdomain/urlid, where shortdomain is a domain name of the short URL, and urlid is an identifier (ID) of the short URL.
A desirable feature of social application platforms, such as microblog, is fast information propagation. This feature is also utilized by a third-party website, such as an e-commerce website, which uses a social application platform to promote its information.